Alan Donaldson - The Glasgow Jazz Pictures
28th May - 29th June 2025
Trongate 103
“In Paris in 2016 after work I fancied doing something different from going out for a bite at the local bistro. I had been listening to ‘Chet Plays Paris' so I decided a jazz club. I had never been to a jazz club, I wasn’t even an aficionado of jazz at the time.
So when I went downstairs to the basement and the Sunset room it was everything I could have hoped for. Small dark and intimate, so when Henri Texier performed with his quartet I had an epiphany. Okay so Paris is a world centre, a city renowned for jazz, it couldn’t happen in Glasgow right? Wrong.
Tommy Smith established the jazz course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2009 since then former students have stayed in Glasgow forming bands writing music and performing.
In Oct 2021 I heard Fergus McCreadie’s trio. Soon after Pete Johnstone at Jazz at the Merchants House, Strata at Bloc, gigs at the Blue Arrow, the Glad Café, and Laylow at Rumshack, the Butterfly and the Pig. World class jazz was on my door step.
Think of jazz photography and generaly you think of black and white images from the 40’s 50’s or 60’s with dramatic lighting, cigarette smoke and probably a horn. The work of Herman Leonard for instance. There are many others of course, I saw prints by Roy DeCarava which were wonderfully evocative and the book, 'The Jazz Loft Project', with photgraph’s by W Eugene Smith, is remarkable.
That was then and beautiful. Now I prefer digital and colour.
Since jazz is a complex form requiring good technique but also the ability to improvise I decided I would try and mirror this with the photographic technique. I use continuous lighting with flash, incorporate coloured gels and improvise with movement and a slow shutter speed.
It’s a live performance, everything happens in the studio and in the camera. Post production is a simple tidying up process.
With thanks to the acts in the Scottish and Glasgow jazz community for helping to make this happen.”
Alan Donaldson is a Glasgow based photographer who has had a working practice over 4 decades since studying photography in the city. He self-published a book ‘Loch Ardinning Pictures’ in 2021; exhibited at Sogo Arts (2023), a series of pictures he called ‘Peripheral’ referencing back to his first project in Clydebank; exhibited the Glasgow Jazz Pictures 22-24 at the New Glasgow Society, and published the book Rimshot/Snapshot some of which you will see here (2024). In 2027 he will exhibit the Loch Ardinning Pictures at Lillie Art Gallery in Milngavie.
Banner image: Gaia, © Alan Donaldson
Insert image: Liam Shortall, © Alan Donaldson